Apples from New Zealand?

In New York you have to be 16 years old to get your permit. Being the oldest of my siblings, as soon as I turned 16 I had to drive and do extra chores for my parents like go food shopping. One day I had to go pick up apples from the store and as I went to pick out the perfect ones I noticed something strange: all the apples were from New Zealand. From the other side of the world. To get to my supermarket, those apples had to be flown in to America, put onto a variety of different trucks and transported throughout the US, eventually landing in my town. It seemed ridiculous to me that we would even think to buy apples from a country so far away. In, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver, she explains how each food item in a typical US meal has traveled on average 1,500 miles. If every US citizen was to then eat just one meal a week composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 57.2 million barrels of oil each year. Why do we do this? Why would we waste so much time and energy and precious fuel just to transport apples from thousands of miles away, when there are perfectly good ones grown not even an hour's drive away? While the government does subsidize different areas of the food industry, it still baffles me to this day that we would go through so many loops and hurdles for a food item most of us take for granted in the Big Apple state.